Skyrmions, baryons and domain walls

by Sven Bjarke Gudnason

Friday 16 May 2014, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

248 (Building C, first floor)

We will review a low-energy effective theory of mesons and baryons introduced by Skyrme, in which the baryon is a soliton. Stability requires a higher-derivative term of fourth order (or higher) in order for the soliton to have finite energy and a finite size. A problem with the original model with a fourth-order term is that the binding energy is too big and even though a BPS bound exists, no soliton solution saturating the bound does. Recently a model with sixth-order terms has been studied in the literature which possesses a BPS bound that can be saturated and hence near-BPS solutions can have parametrically small binding energies which fits experimental data better. We will study such a model in various limits and finally we will discuss Skyrmions in various different dimensions related to one another by domain walls.